Creating and destroying ‘the man who does not exist’: the peasantry and modernity in Welsh and Irish writing

Abstract

The literature of both Wales and Ireland in the modern period has used the imagined figure of the peasant to emblematize the nation. Yet the peasant is a contradictory emblem, especially for modernity, since he is associated with the past and with stasis. Consequently, both literary traditions reveal a repeated pattern of creation of an idealized peasantry, followed by its destruction in order to make way for a reinvented form of national identity. To demonstrate this, the early nineteenth-century representations of the Irish peasantry in the work of William Carleton are compared with those of the Welsh peasantry in the work of Anne Beale, followed by a comparison of the constructions of the peasant in the late nineteenth-century Celtic revivals of both countries in the wake of the Blue Books Report in Wales and the Great Famine in Ireland. Finally, the satirical portraits of the peasantry in the twentieth-century short stories of George Moore and Caradoc Evans are considered side by side. Ultimately, the peasant may be seen as embodying the contradictions of nationalism itself in the context of modernity, since the figure contains both residual and emergent cultural formations. Thus, the peasant is continually resurrected in analogous ways by writers in both countries, revealing again the proximity of the Welsh and Irish constructions of cultural nationalism and literary history.

Keywords:

• peasantry
• modernity
• Welsh
• Irish

Notes

 1. I am drawing here on Luke Gibbons's brilliant account of Raymond Williams, Wales and Ireland in his lecture ‘Home Truths: Raymond Williams, Postcolonialism and the Celtic Periphery’, delivered at the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded ‘Romantic Nations’ symposium hosted by the Ireland–Wales Research Network and held at Cardiff University on 25 October 2008. See also Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, and Daniel Williams, Who Speaks for Wales?

 2. Carleton, Preface to Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, x.

 3. Beale, Traits and Stories of the Welsh Peasantry, vii.

 4. Carleton, Preface to Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, xxi.

 5. O'Connell, Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement, 148.

 6. O'Connell, Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement, 10.

 7. O'Connell, Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement, 22.

 8. O'Connell, Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement, 75.

 9. See Yeats, ‘Introduction’, Representative Irish Tales, and O'Connell, Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement.

10. See Morash, Writing the Irish Famine, 162ff.

11. Revd James Denning, quoted in Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales , Part II: Brecknock, Cardigan, Radnor and Monmouth, presented by Jelinger C. Symons, 99.

12. Morgan, ‘The Gwerin of Wales’, 135.

13. Butler, ‘Irishwomen and the Home Language’.

14. Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales , 520.

15. Marx, ‘The Class Struggles in France 1848–50’, 159; see also Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, 302.

16. Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales , 309–10.

17. Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales , 527, 535.

18. Morgan, ‘The Gwerin of Wales’, 139.

19. For further details, see Davies, O.M. Edwards.

20. The cover, in fiery red, contains almost every conceivable emblem of Welshness, including two peasant women in Welsh costume, one playing a harp, the other spinning, along with the obligatory leeks, dragons, and castles. Its motto is just as telling: ‘I godi'r hen wlad yn ei hôl’ (To rebuild the old land).

21. Brown, The Life of W.B. Yeats, 81.

22. Edwards, Clych Adgof.

23. Yeats, ‘The Fisherman’, in W.B. Yeats: Selected Poetry, 97.

24. The original Welsh text is now available online at http://www.booksfromthepast.org.

25. The original Welsh text is now available online at http://www.booksfromthepast.org, 2.

26. Hopkins, ‘Peasant Languages and Celtic Nations’.

27. Quoted in O'Connor, Celtic Dawn, 73.

28. Quoted in Watson, Irish Identity and the Literary Revival, 34.

29. Moore, The Untilled Field, xx.

30. Caradoc Evans, Letter to the Western Mail, 27 November 1915.

31. Moore, Hail and Farewell, 139–40.

32. Evans, My People, 142.

33. Evans, My People, 123.

34. James Joyce, ‘The Holy Office’ (1904).

35. Rees, ‘Inequalities’, 80.

36. Evans, My People, 95.

37. Evans, My People, 101.

38. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 166.

39. Thompson, ‘The Rural Tradition’, 180.